EverQuote at William Blair Conference: Strategic Growth and Innovation

On Wednesday, 04 June 2025, EverQuote (NASDAQ:EVER) presented at the 45th Annual William Blair Growth Stock Conference. The company offered insights into its strategic direction, balancing growth with profitability, and leveraging technology for competitive advantage. While EverQuote reported record financial performance, challenges such as tariffs were also addressed.

Key Takeaways

• EverQuote reported record revenue and adjusted EBITDA for Q1 2024, with revenue growth of 80% year-over-year.
• The company is focusing on integrating AI to enhance operational efficiency and customer experience.
• EverQuote’s market strategy includes precise targeting, likened to "spearfishing," offering carriers efficiency over broader approaches.
• The total addressable market for distribution and advertising is estimated at $115 billion annually, with digital advertising expected to grow by over 15% annually.
• Tariffs may increase costs, but carriers are positioned to manage these due to healthy combined ratios.

Financial Results

• Q1 2024 Performance:

- Record revenue and Variable Marketing Dollars (VMD).

- Record adjusted EBITDA with a margin of 13.5%, up from last year.

- Variable Marketing Margin (VMM) of 28%, consistent with guidance.

- Operating expenses were $24.5 million, similar to Q3 of the previous year.

• Long-Term Targets:

- Aim for 20%+ average annual top-line growth.

- Target EBITDA margins to grow to 20%.

Operational Updates

• Market Opportunity:

- Total addressable market for distribution and advertising spend is about $115 billion annually.

- Digital advertising spend is $7 billion, expected to grow by over 15% annually.

• AI Implementation:

- AI voice technology is replacing transactional conversations handled by IVR or call center reps.

- AI tools are improving the productivity of internal teams.

• Direct to Carrier Integrations:

- Focus on deep integrations to enhance conversion rates for carriers using Smart Campaigns and data-driven bidding technology.

Future Outlook

• Rate Environment:

- Potential for further recovery as half of the top 25 customers are not back to peak spend levels.

- California presents a significant opportunity for rate increases.

• Tariffs:

- Some incremental costs expected in the second half of the year due to tariffs on auto parts.

- Carriers are healthy and can absorb potential increases in claims costs.

• Integration with AI Platforms:

- Exploring paid advertising, plugin, and content-oriented SEO strategies for emerging AI platforms.

Q&A Highlights

• Traffic Sources:

- Google is the largest traffic partner, contributing about 20% of traffic through search and display networks.

- Focus remains on paid traffic due to the opaque nature of insurance rates.

• Impact of AI on Traffic:

- New search engines like Perplexity and ChatGPT are expected to generate traffic.

- Plans to explore widgets, tools, and content-oriented strategies are underway.

In conclusion, EverQuote’s presentation at the William Blair Conference highlighted its strategic growth, operational efficiency, and future potential. For a detailed account, refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - 45th Annual William Blair Growth Stock Conference:

Ralph Schackart, Internet Analyst, William Blair: Good afternoon. I’m Ralph Schackart, Internet Analyst here at William Blair that covers EverQuote. Thanks for attending our annual growth stock conference. Today we’re happy to have Joseph, CFO back, Jamie, CEO of EverQuote, cover the company since its IPO and happy to have you back as always. Thank you.

I have to tell you, if you don’t mind, please check our website for disclosures just to check my compliance box. And then EverQuote is not going to be doing a presentation, so I’ve asked both Joseph and Jamie to maybe do a very expansive kind of overview of the business as we kick things off, and then we’ll go into q and a fireside chat after that as well. Would you could we grab the door too at some point? Thank you. Alright.

Maybe, kick things off. So for investors that are new to the story, maybe just give a good overview if you could please of what you do, sort of the evolutions of the business, talk about sort of the growth prospects going forward, and maybe that’d be a good, launching off point.

Jamie, CEO, EverQuote: Sure. Thanks for joining us. Evergood’s leading online insurance marketplace. We find consumers wherever they are on the Internet with some intent to buy insurance, get them to our EverQuote hosted properties where web properties where we’ll gather all the relevant underwriting information that would be required to match and connect them with the right insurance provider for them. And then we will, you know, seamlessly as possible try and get them to to the right quotes.

So for the consumer, you know, we help them save time and money shopping and re shopping for insurance and for the providers, are primarily the direct to consumer carriers and local agents, we’re a large and efficient source of growth of new policies for them. We operate primarily in auto insurance, 90% of the business is auto and balance 10% or so is homeowners and we are, you know, today the leading P and C online insurance marketplace.

Joseph, CFO, EverQuote: Maybe a little color for financial context would be helpful for folks. Q1, announced our results. Q1 is our fourth straight quarter in a row of record revenue, VMD, Variable Marketing Dollars, and adjusted EBITDA. Our adjusted EBITDA is also one that’s very high converting to cash. When you think about the model, it’s a business that at high level had a period of rapid recovery in the auto carrier spend in the course of last year.

It’s continued into this year. We’re now going into a period where the carriers have a very healthy backdrop in terms of combined ratio. We’ll talk more about the industry, but a very healthy combined ratio is where they want to grow and where through digital channels, the means to do it. And you have a favorable backdrop with consumers who are looking to shop given auto insurance rates are up significantly, so that’s a pretty healthy dynamic for us as a business. And then the last thing I’d say sort of in the in the business high level from from a financial viewpoint is, you’ve seen us go through this really nice evolution in our model where we’ve built really a sort of balancing growth and profitability.

You know, top line growth for us since our IPO, the CAGR has been 22%. You know, you’ve we’re we think about our long term model averaging 20% top line growth with expanding EBITDA margins. Last year, they were just, like, 11 and a half percent. You know, we’ve indicated this year they’ll probably be 50, two hundred basis more than that going towards 20% in the long term. So you you think of that as a backdrop for the story Jamie described with a large market opportunity and a strong financial model.

Ralph Schackart, Internet Analyst, William Blair: Great. Maybe just kind of touching on the market opportunity, if you could maybe help us think about the TAM and how you size it and how carriers think about, you know, the digital channel as a source of traffic and binding policies.

Joseph, CFO, EverQuote: Sure. So maybe I’ll start out. When you think about the market we serve, it’s it’s carriers, insurance carriers, agents trying to grow their business. Right? If you look at the amount that’s spent on distribution and advertising, it’s about a hundred and $15,000,000,000 spent a year.

Within that, the portion that is digital advertising today is about 7,000,000,000. That 7,000,000,000, if you look at various industry estimates, growing 15 plus percent over the next several years is the expectation. And the driver of that underlying is insurance is a lagger going online. If you look at the broader industries of, you know, companies going online, any broader financial services travel, they’re fifty, sixty plus percent of spend is on digital channels. Look at insurance, it’s well under half.

It’s like a third to 40% based on the studies. So, that’s the backdrop in terms of the TAM.

Ralph Schackart, Internet Analyst, William Blair: Great. And then maybe just on the actual product itself or the experience on the consumer side, you know, what’s the key problem you’re trying to solve for the carriers as well? Maybe kind of walk through both sides of the marketplace, how you’re connecting people, what you’re trying to solve, and maybe get a sense of, you know, average cost savings.

Jamie, CEO, EverQuote: Yeah. So, for a consumer, it’s it’s pretty straightforward. We’re trying to, as if as quickly and efficiently as possible, get them to the right insurance policy for them. And consumer shops, you know, their insurance with us, they save 600 to $700. They’ll also save quite a bit of time because the alternative to to using, you know, a service like EverQuote would be to go out to, you know, various agents and carriers and try and, you know, get a bunch of quotes, have to reenter a bunch of information, provide a bunch of information to, you know, over the phone to some agents online to some carriers and all that.

I mean, if anybody’s shopped insurance lately, you know, it can take literally hours of time and so we’ll we’ll help them get to a quote far more efficiently and and ultimately to the right quote. And the one thing about insurance that a lot of people don’t appreciate is that every there is like literally a right answer for every individual consumer, if you define right answer as being the lowest price for a given level of coverage. Most consumers have no idea who is the right provider for them. Every carrier specializes in a different segment of the market. They all price their risk down to the individual level, so Joseph could go to Liberty Mutual and get one rate, the same coverage, Progressive will give them a very different rate.

We have a ton of data that’s been accumulated over the years that helps us match, you know, sort of sort and filter and do a lot of the work for the consumer before they, you know, get to that that quoting point, so we can really narrow the the the options for them very efficiently. And then for the carrier, I just go over the other side of the marketplace, you know, providers are generally looking to grow and to grow profitably, so it’s, you know, add more policyholders and pay the right price to acquire them. And we provide a very large, you know, very large pool of prospective customers to them, but importantly we also allow them to target with much more precision than they can through any other channel because we’ve gathered all the relevant underwriting data for each consumer. They can literally, you know, we will say, hey, we have this specific consumer. They have these sort of attributes, you know, this is their this is where they live, this is their driving records, how many cars they own, what kind of cars they own, so on and so forth.

And then they can make a determination as to whether they want to bid to acquire that customer and if so, how much they’re willing to pay. So in a world where, you know, in a market where targeting is probably the the the sort of paramount, attribute you’re looking for in your customer acquisition, EverQuote allows them to to target and therefore drive far more efficiency in their ad spend than they could get in any other channel.

Ralph Schackart, Internet Analyst, William Blair: You talked about rates. Maybe, Jamie, if you could provide some historical context of why carriers set rate, maybe a little bit of a history lesson, where we were, sort of where we are today, and then, you know, what states haven’t set rate? Yeah. Broader audits.

Jamie, CEO, EverQuote: Yeah. So, you know, insurance is a regulated industry. Insurance companies have to file and get approval for the rates that they charge with every at the state level and so, you know, they’re periodically reviewing and filing for rate changes sort of up or down. There was a bit of a shock to the system with COVID beginning in 2020, ’20 ’20 ’1 when the loss pressure increased at like a very dramatic rate, so going in, you know, going into COVID, things were somewhat normal. Early days of COVID, all the cars came off the roads, no accidents, carriers were remarkably profitable, and they started to lower their rates to compete for business, and then the supply chain shocks began to set in, which made the cost to repair and replace vehicles go up dramatically, seemingly overnight.

So, then all of a sudden they were upside down and now they paying out more on claims losses than they are taking in on premium and they’re unprofitable, basically every incremental policy they’re acquiring is unprofitable. So this brought the industry into what’s referred to as as a hard market. Hard market is, you know, when kind of the carriers are are generally not priced right relative to the risk that’s out there, and in that kind of market they all will pull back. They don’t want to acquire new policyholders until they’re able to get their rates up to some adequate levels relative to the risk that’s that’s out there. So they worked through this process of filing for rate increases and it’s going to go state by state over the last few years, the industry has been working through it.

And really last year, we began we began to see sort of rate adequacy take hold, you know, and again, this is happening at a carrier sort of state level, and we saw a lot of spend which was taken out of the the the our marketplace in the 2021 to 2023 period start to come back in, That’s reflected, as you’ll see, in in extreme extremely high growth rates, you know, last year and turning the corner into this year. So where are we now in that recovery cycle? I would say we are, you know, we have sort of broad based recovery, a lot of carriers, a lot of healthy state footprint, so the marketplace is back to a healthy place. But we’re still at a point where, you know, half of our top 25 customers are not yet back to sort of peak spend levels. So there is still some, you know, some runway to go in this recovery, at the carrier level.

And then if you look at it sort of through the geographical lens, you’ve got some big states that haven’t quite given rate the way that the carriers need just yet. California being the biggest example, That would represent another leg up in the recovery. Expect all this to continue to flow through over the next twelve to eighteen months.

Ralph Schackart, Internet Analyst, William Blair: Great. Then as, let’s say, carriers all set rate in all the states and we’re back to equilibrium, if that’s the right way to think it. As they’re thinking about a direct digital channel, maybe like a progressive or as they’re thinking about agent channels or just carrier channels in general, why would they choose you over the competition? Like, what really sets you apart or why are you additive to sort of their direct approach?

Jamie, CEO, EverQuote: Yeah. Sure. So I would, you know, start with with the targeting. So if you if you’re comparing our channel to other channels, the primary advantage of advertising in our channel is that we allow carriers to target and bid with much more precision than they can in any other channel. That would include a Google or a Facebook, you know, those those are obviously large channels.

They’re they can find high intent in the channel like Google, but you you you don’t you’re not paying for, you know, relative to the value, you’re not bidding relative to the value of individual consumer which is really, really important in insurance. And that’s why I think most carriers would characterize our channel as probably the most efficient from a from a, an ad spend efficiency standpoint, and where they try and concentrate, you know, as many dollars as they can relative to the the scale, the the volume that’s available in our channels. And then if you look at EverQuote specifically rather relative to other players in the channel, you know, we would prime we’d point to a couple of key differentiators. The first is through the data and technology that that we’ve developed over the years to better match and connect consumers with providers. That rep that sort of manifests in, again, higher relatively higher ad spend efficiency carriers which allows us to get more budget from them.

And then the second piece is insurance distribution, you have the direct to consumer carriers, but actually 60 to 70% of insurance is distributed through local agents. And we have, you know, over the last decade or so built out the largest local insurance agent network in the industry. And so now for every consumer that comes in, only can we match them with the progressives and GEICO’s of the world, but we also have a way to connect them with the local agent, State Farm, Farmers, Allstate, independent agents that really gets them the the full breadth of of, of coverage they need.

Joseph, CFO, EverQuote: One of the analogies we sometimes explain for just to help make it real folks is why do carriers benefit working with us versus just going direct in their own channels? For the carriers, it’s like, you know, fishing. Right? They cast a broad net. They pull in lots of fish.

With us, that’s really spearfishing. They can very specifically target the profile they want. And because we have more information, we know more about the given fish, to use the analogy, they can get exactly what they want that fits their their criteria to cut for a policy profile they wanna acquire. And that’s the that’s by the way to sort of simplify it. And then the capabilities Jamie mentioned reinforce it.

We can do that in a way because we’ve been at this for so long better than others in the industry. That efficiency that we bring is is overlay with all this tech data that we’ve been able to build. And every day, we get better and better using that data, and we get more and more of that data. And that just builds a flywheel to make us stronger in in doing our our fishing analogy.

Ralph Schackart, Internet Analyst, William Blair: And then on the spear phishing analogy, are they doing that just to balance out risk for the their book of business or, you know, why wouldn’t they wanna continue just bring in lots of fish?

Joseph, CFO, EverQuote: At the end of the day, it’s about acquiring a profile consumer meets their exact policy profile. The better they can do that, the more efficient their spend is. So when they cast that net, there’s lots of fish they can’t have a match for. Right? They want if you wanna for them, they want to spend where they know they’re gonna get results and that’s what that’s what we love to do.

Because when they get information from us, just to give you to go with the analogies, they know details about that consumer. When they cast the broad net, they don’t know what they’re pulling in. And as Jamie said, the business of insurance is very different than a lot of other businesses in that companies make their business focusing on a specific profile of consumer and the rate they charge. You think about matching up the rate based on the coverage, that’ll be different across carriers because they think about consumers differently. And even within carriers, their profiles can change from time to time based upon underwriting criteria, how they’re thinking about broader risk management.

Ralph Schackart, Internet Analyst, William Blair: And then one of the I know we’ll get to products in a second, but just maybe skip ahead a little bit. One of the things I know you’ve been working on are the direct to carrier integrations. Also, as a point of differentiating, I think, in the model. Can you maybe expand on that and, you know, how to differentiate and how the data feed helps, you know, further that spear phishing if we stay with that analogy?

Jamie, CEO, EverQuote: Yeah. So, there are there are a couple of, you know, things we’re focused on with carriers. The first is is deep integrations. So when a consumer fills out all their their information with us, you know, we have over the years worked to integrate with the with the websites, the digital quoting flows of all

Ralph Schackart, Internet Analyst, William Blair: the

Jamie, CEO, EverQuote: carriers. We’ll try and get the consumer to basically land as close to or on the quote from a carrier to minimize the amount of data reentry maximize conversion rate through, you know, through the funnel for the carrier. So that helps drive again more efficiency in in their ad spend with us. The second thing that that we’ve focused a lot on and, you know, has has really begun to to, take hold in the last year is a product that we call Smart Campaigns, where we’ll basically apply our data and our ML based bidding technology that we use for for our own traffic acquisition. We’ve now productized it and made it available to carriers.

So for those carriers who are not super sophisticated at at bidding for traffic online, which is the vast majority of carriers, we will now allow them to basically opt into this product and let us do the bidding into our own marketplace on their behalf. So they can tell us, you know, here’s here’s sort of how we think about the world, our segmentation, our KPI targets, and we can build a model on their behalf that that does the bidding to improve the the efficiency that they’ll get from from the marketplace.

Ralph Schackart, Internet Analyst, William Blair: Great. Maybe just kind of switching gears a little bit. Obviously, a lot of conversations going on about tariffs and the fluidity there. Can you maybe provide some perspective on how it may impact either your business or how it may impact the carrier spend?

Joseph, CFO, EverQuote: Sure. So when you think of tariffs, first, our business directly not impacted. The impact is really on our carrier customers and the specific impact is on potential inflation on cost of claims. And so if you think about what drives claims cost, there’s one of the elements is cost of repair. One of the key elements of cost of repair is auto parts.

And so what what based on everything that’s known today, carriers are expecting that they’ll have some incremental cost in the second half of the year based on what’s known about tariffs. And so the question we often get, well, is tariffs like another COVID? Is it gonna be the same thing for the industry? This this great shock to the system. And I think it’s couple of things I’d say bear in mind is, one is every estimate out there is this is a small piece.

This is a piece, but only one piece of cost You think about cost of claims back in COVID, you had supply chains just broke entirely. So you had so you had you had costs go up dramatically to get the parts available. But you also had other elements like auto labor costs. Your colleague Adam Klauber talks about a lot.

Auto labor costs went up spiked dramatically because no one wanted to work at the time in in repair shops because they want to be inside with COVID. That is more stable now. Then you look at the cost of replacement, which is when you total a car. You look at that and that relates to used car prices. And used car prices have come down significantly from the peaks of COVID.

You may recall when we were all trying to get cars at that time, there were no new cars. Everyone bought used cars as a substitute. So if you look at that in comparison to now, the impact is isolated really to auto parts and what’s known is feels like pretty absorbable. Why? Because the carriers are very healthy, right?

It’s important to bear in mind that the carriers combined ratios are in the at a very, very healthy levels relative to their norm. So if you think about a reference point, carriers talk about combined ratios of, you know, being in the mid nineties as as a goal. Meaning, take your revenues less all your costs, the difference is your profit margin. Right now they’re in the low to mid eighties. If you think about that dynamic, that gives them reasonable pretty reasonable room to absorb it, increase inflation costs on claims.

You might go so far as to say as a quasi regulated industry, that, you know, having some increase in in pressure on claims costs, you know, they could not only absorb, but it may if you think about broader public relations with insurance commissions in various states, you know, it could sort of tie into that well. So you look at all that, we think tariffs, everything that’s known today, very isolated limit I say limited and known. And then you say, well, what happens if we don’t know it? Like, say there’s this unknown that’s gonna change. I think one of the carriers did a nice job talking about this in a recent call and they said, one of the left the things we learned during COVID is how to do rapid rate increases in several states at one time.

One of the challenges during COVID is carriers were chasing rate. So they had to file constant rate filings with several states and have to do it at multiple times a year. That was not a muscle they had built in most carriers. Most carriers, you know, you file rates, you know, you’re done. Maybe file a second one, you know, nine months later.

During COVID, they were constantly chasing rate. They had to build an apparatus to do that. Carriers have now built it. So if you did have the you say, seems to be limited, everything we know. If something unusual happened, what is the ability to respond?

Very different now than it was during COVID.

Ralph Schackart, Internet Analyst, William Blair: Great. Switching gears to to products. Jamie, maybe give us some perspective about the products that you’re able to build pre Gen AI and then now that you have Gen AI as a tool set, you know, how is that augmented both your product development, speed to market, and then also internally how are you leveraging it as well?

Jamie, CEO, EverQuote: Yeah. So, you know, we think about we kind of bucket, like, AI applications in into two categories. The first is more ones that are more operationally like, efficiency oriented. So, yeah, how can we adopt or build tools that make the team, you know, improve the productivity of the team? And then second is more, I guess, customer facing, right, or or or driving sort of incremental value for customers.

So on the former, you know, I think we have we’ve started to get broad adoption of a number of sort of AI tools, some Gen AI, and then you’ve got more traditional AIs or machine learning based applications. Couple of examples there, you’ve got well, on the ML side, all of our bidding technologies, you know, we’ve been using ML to build this bidding technology and develop it over the last few years and it’s really started to drive some significant impact in terms of our ability to both grow and and manage our margin. It’s also, from an operational efficiency standpoint, taken work that used to be done by, you know, an example, there’s one team that used to be 15 to 20 people that is now five people and it’s, you know, managing a lot more spend and doing so more efficiently than the 15 to 20 people did back then. And then you’ve got more sort of traditional tooling, things like, you know, Copilot. We have engineers.

There’s a good amount of our code which is now being you know, first pass is being generated by AI. There’s analogous tools in our, you know, customer service organization, analytics organizations that are are sort of being tested. So I think we are pushing the teams to adopt these tools where we think they can allow us to basically do more with less, broadly speaking. Then you come over to the sort of customer facing side of the world and, you know, we’ve been kind of scanning for applications that we felt would sort of meaningfully improve either the experience or or the outcome for customers. And there’s a number that we’ve begun testing.

So in the for us, AI voice is an interesting sort of use case, in that we do a lot of telephony, and, you know, we have a lot of customer conversations that are fairly transactional. That’s one place where, you know, we’re beginning to test can the AI voice replace what is today done by either an IVR or, you know, a a sort of inside call center rep, and we’re pretty confident that we’ll be able to transition a lot of our sort of voice interactions into, you know, into into an AI modality. And then once we do that, you can start to imagine other applications where you’re actually taking on some of the work that’s being done today in like a web form in, you know, in a different format whether that’s GenAI sort of chat based or GenAI voice based. But we do think there will be, you know, applications that that begin to evolve as we develop the capability, get it into production, and and start working on it with actual customers. Okay.

Ralph Schackart, Internet Analyst, William Blair: So we’re doing time. Alright. Pushed on time. I’ll move to analyst mode here. I’ll ask a a three parter as we typically do.

Maybe move to the financials, Joseph. Maybe give an overview of Q1, you know, in your opinion, what were the real standouts, the most recent performance? Remind investors if you can on your long term targets, and I think historically, you’ve or more recently, you’ve talked about the pathway to a billion dollar company. Maybe sort of lay out the building blocks of how you

Joseph, CFO, EverQuote: get there. Sure. So for q one for us, it was it was mentioned this earlier in our call earlier discussion. It’s another record quarter for some revenue VMD and adjusted EBITDA. It’s a story where we had growth year on year, you know, 80 plus percent on revenue reflecting that 2024 was the start of auto recovery and it’s continued the momentum continued into the start of this year.

You know, importantly for us, when you think about the financial model, as we as you as you go down from the top, I’ll sort of bring So variable marketing margin dollars, which is revenue less advertising costs, we were and is and then we refer to VMM as the margin on that. That ran 28% in q one, very much in line with what we said, sort of high twenties. Then as you go further down, you look at operating expenses. We have, you know, one of the the learnings that we had coming out of COVID is how to more be more disciplined in managing our operating expenses.

And you’ve seen that discipline continue as we’ve come into this period of growth, which resulting in a lot of dollars going to the bottom line. OpEx in q one was 24 and a half, you know, was very similar to what was in Q3 of last year. Q4, the guide for this quarter implies, you know, a little over 25. So that’s I think how we manage the business on the cost side. And then on the EBITDA side, what that resulted in is adjusted EBITDA that was at a record level and had EBITDA margins around 13 and a half percent in q one, which was an uptick from where we ended last year.

And what we and so when you think about that, what does it mean as you look ahead to the rest of the year? It’d probably be helpful for you. We we do not provide annual guidance. We provide guidance for the quarter, for q two, but we do give some insights for the rest of the year. So maybe just to touch on touch on those.

As we think about the business progressing through the year, let’s talk about that VMM margin. We see VMM margin sort of staying in the high twenties. The puts and takes on VMM margin are interesting. One of the dynamics on on advertising is it’s an advertising is the dynamics of the advertising market which we do not control. And interestingly, a key driver of that, one of the biggest competitors for advertising dollars is actually our customers who are doing general brand spend that we talked about earlier.

And so that’s one dynamic in that market and they’ve been doing that significantly. And so that has put some pressure on BMM margin. The flip side is we’ve counterbalanced that with what we do with our bidding technology and just and allows us to be more efficient in our advertising spend. Just to give you some context on that, you know, the high twenties, if you think about our business, you know, start of 2024, I look in the rearview mirror to ’23, the VMM margin auto marketplace was basically 29%, but the business was half the size of it today, well under half the size. If we had said back then that our business would more than double, have an advertising environment that’s more competitive, people would be very surprised that we have the same margins and I think it speaks to what we’re doing with our bidding technology.

As you progress down the the P and L looking ahead for the rest of the year, what we’ve talked about is we’re kind of incremental investments in the second half of the year, which will result in our EBITDA margin staying around the current levels. At or near this sort of, you know, 13, you know, 13 and a half percent range. And the investments are principally gonna be in areas that are around our technology or that will not benefit 2025. They’re really focusing on ’26 and ’27 as we think about making the investments to be a strong growth business going forward, leveraging the capabilities we have on the tech on the data stack and also on our AI capabilities. And then I’ll I’ll touch last on the long term model, which is we view this as averaging 20 plus percent growth on the top line with growing profitability in the bottom line.

EBITDA margins, you know, depending on we’ll see how the year finally shakes out, but if you based on what we’ve said, you’ll see EBITDA margins relative to last year tick up 850 basis points over 2024. You know, as we go forward, we think the long term dynamic is 20 averaging 20% top line growth on average year over year, toppled with getting to EBITDA margins of 20%, and we’ll see some incremental margins added each year. And importantly, it’s going to to cash flow as well.

Ralph Schackart, Internet Analyst, William Blair: Great. Got just a quick minute or two if there’s any questions in the audience. Sir?

Jamie, CEO, EverQuote: Yeah. So, you know, to today, we have a fairly balanced, like, traffic portfolio. Right? So search is just a piece of that. I think our our largest traffic partner is is Google.

I think that’s around 20% and that would include Google search and other Google platforms like their display their display network. So so that’s really like the the part of, you know, of the traffic landscape that would be affected. Today, you know, just to keep in context, like insurance is a is is a somewhat unique category in that a, it’s very transactional, like lower funnel searches that are typically happening, so there’s very little organic traffic in search, It’s almost, you know, all paid traffic. And number two, it’s a very opaque category, so unlike, you know, a sort of restaurant information is like broadly available on the on the open Internet, insurance rates are not. So probably, like, in in part for those reasons, we have seen no impact to kind of traffic flows in, you know, paid search in in the insurance category.

Over time, do we expect that, you know, the perplexities, the ChatGPT’s, the Geminis of the world will begin to to generate traffic? Yes. I mean, they already are at it’s growing quickly but a relatively small scale. And so I think the big question for the industry is what will be the model to actually tap into that traffic? And I don’t think the the platforms themselves have quite figured that out.

There could be a paid advertising model which would be sort of relatively straightforward for us to plug into. It could be sort of more of like a plug in model where you’re you’re building sort of like widgets or tools that integrate with these platforms and so we’re, you know, exploring those as well. And it could be more of like a content oriented SEO strategy much like you had with Google where it’s like, we just have to put good information out there and then you’ll get some backlinks as a, you know, as a result of that. And so I think all those are possible. We are, you know, we’re kind of actively working on on developing a point of view on where to place our bets.

I think right now, it’s still relatively early and and in the insurance category specifically, I think it will it will be a laggard to kind of make its way into these platforms. Unfortunately,

Ralph Schackart, Internet Analyst, William Blair: we’re out of time. Alright. Joseph, Jamie,

Joseph, CFO, EverQuote: thank you so

Ralph Schackart, Internet Analyst, William Blair: much and thank you for your interest in EverQuote.

Jamie, CEO, EverQuote: Thank you all. Thank a day. Thanks.

Joseph, CFO, EverQuote: This presentation has now finished. Please check back shortly for the archive.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.